High-level system description methodologies can allow designers and system architects to modify the traditional system design approach. Some languages, such as SystemC, may allow system architects to model a circuit or system at a transaction-level in order to test the specified functionality and get early performance reports.
The traditional design cycle still follows or often runs concurrently with this architectural modeling. The design will be written in a hardware description level usually at RTL (register transfer level) to be synthesized and finalized into silicon. This brings up the need for a correlation of disparate descriptions of the same circuit or system.
The problem can be turned around chronologically as well but with the same verification challenges. Silicon IP vendors may be required to provide a transaction-level model of their part in order for their customers to realize a high-level simulation of a system embedding the part. This means that an existing design with a RTL description may need to be modeled at the transaction-level.